Each creature was viewed as the artifact of a divine blueprint. The role of the biologist was to reverse engineer God's handiwork.

2002, P. Samuelson and S. Scotchmer, "The Law and Economics of Reverse Engineering," The Yale Law Journal, vol. 111, no. 7, p. 1584,

In theory, there should be no need to reverse-engineer a patented invention to get information about how to make it because the patent specification should inform the relevant technical community of how to make the invention.